First, the fact that we could get a large round like this, at a really attractive valuation, led by one of the top venture firms, is a real testament to the excitement and promise that people are seeing in Docker. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a reflection of the amazing work done by both the team at Docker and by the broader ecosystem of community members, partners, platforms, and contributors. Of course, it is also a reflection of Solomon’s incredible vision and foresight.*

Second, the round gives us both the board and the funding we need to take Docker to the next level. As should be obvious both from the size of this round and by the recent hiring that we’ve done, we think that Docker can be an extraordinarily important element in the next generation computing stack, and are gearing up to pursue that opportunity very aggressively. This round gives us that capability.

Here is some detail on:

The round and our new partners

Where we stand now with the Docker ecosystem

What we are planning to do with new funding

Detail on the round itself

We raised a total of $15M in this round. The round was led by Jerry Chen of Greylock Ventures, who will be joining our board.

In case you’re not familiar with Greylock, they are consistently rated as one of the top ventures firms, with deep experience investing in open source (e.g. Red Hat, Cloudera) as well as an impressive string of recent successes, including: LinkedIn, Facebook, Palo Alto Networks, Workday and more.

Before joining Greylock, Jerry was Vice President of Cloud and Application Services at VMware, where he was part of the executive team that scaled the company from 400 to over 15,000 employees and $5B in revenue. During his nine years at VMware, Jerry launched dozens of products (including several “1.0” releases) and started two new business units for VMware. Jerry brings a wealth of experience in virtualization, productization, and scaling, and he impressed all of us with his vision, experience, and how much he “got” what Docker could become. For Jerry’s perspective on why Greylock invested, you should read his blog post.

In addition to Greylock, we are fortunate to be adding Insight Venture Partners to our investor list. Insight Venture Partners has an impressive history, having played an important role in backing companies like Twitter, Chegg, New Relic, Parallels, and Flipboard. We are getting a terrific addition to our advisory Board–Jerry Murdock–who is the co-founder of Insight Venture Partners. Jerry also “gets” the vision. In his words, “Docker is the embodiment of a Dev/ops dream come true, as they are changing the world for developers and operations professionals In a powerful, efficient and scalable way.”

Finally, we are extremely grateful for the continuing support of the investors and board members who have backed the company since the Series A, including Peter Fenton from Benchmark, Dan Scholnick from Trinity, Jerry Yang, and many others.

Indeed, the only downside to the round is that we will now have three people named “Jerry” in our board meetings, which–given my name–makes us Ben & Jerry’s.

Where we now stand with the ecosystem

Docker’s ecosystem has continued to expand rapidly. In the roughly nine months since our launch, we have received over 400,000 downloads, welcomed more than 300 contributors, and gathered over 5,000 published “Dockerized” applications in its public index. Companies such as eBay, Yandex, Mailgun, CloudFlare and Baidu have publicly discussed their use or support of Docker. The community has driven integrations into important tools such as Chef, Puppet, Salt, Jenkins, and more. And, there are now Docker meetup groups in over 40 cities around the world. Of course, we are incredibly excited by the adoption and support of Docker in platforms such as Red Hat, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, and OpenStack.

Docker Ecosystem

Docker Meetup Groups

How we will use the funds

As stated above, we think that we have a unique opportunity to make a fundamental difference in the way that code is built, run, deployed and scaled. And, we want to invest appropriately.

There are three major areas of investment planned for next year:

1) Continued investment in Open Source Docker

We’re really excited by where Docker has come in the past several months, due both to the efforts of the team at Docker and to our incredible community, including over 300 contributors. But, we have a lot more work to do, including the release of production ready Docker 1.0, adding support for additional platforms, and enabling the long list of isolation, storage, networking, and orchestration capabilities the community is looking for. Of course, we are also investing in the documentation, training, meetups and conferences needed to make it easy for anyone to start using Docker. We are expanding the size of our team, and are always looking for great new additions.

2) Building out the community platform

For the Docker ecosystem to work well, we need to expand the platforms that make it easy to find, publish, and use containers. We are investing in the infrastructure around our public registry, improving the ability to integrate Dockerfiles with source code systems like GitHub, and adding a host of services like developer IDs, timestamping, and digital signatures to allow anyone to confidently assess the origin and provenance of public containers.

3) Building out our commercial capabilities

While Docker itself will always remain free and open source, we are busy gearing up for the launch of both hosted services around Docker and commercial support for Docker. We recently hired James Turnbull, former VP of Technical Operations and Support at Puppet to build out our support organization. We also hired Roger Egan, former VP of North American Channels/SMB at Red hat, to build out our sales organization and partner network. We are incredibly lucky to have these two open source veterans as part of our team. As they scale out their teams, and as the engineering team builds out our hosted services, we hope to make it even easier for enterprises to deploy Docker in production, and for partners to build compelling businesses around Docker.

Conclusion

We had an incredible 2013, and we are looking to have an even more exciting 2014 and beyond.

With this new funding, we should be able to build a company around Docker that is worthy of the momentum and support that we are seeing. A huge thanks to everybody who helped us reach this milestone. The road ahead should be interesting!

——

* The story of Solomon and dotCloud’s pivot is really compelling. As long time board member Peter Fenton (Benchmark) put it,

“Solomon inspired us to invest in the concepts of Docker in its prior life, dotCloud. It took immense courage to reinvent the business as a pure, open source project and to recruit a partner of Ben’s caliber. It’s been inspiring to work with him from the beginning.”

For Dan Schonlick’s (Trinity) insightful take on the pivot, please read his blog post.

Read more on the news

Docker Closes $15 M Series B Funding

Ben Golub is the CEO of Docker, a role he has held since April of 2013. Prior to Docker, Golub was CEO of Gluster, the open source, scale out storage company, which was successfully acquired by Red Hat in 2011. Before joining Gluster, Golub was CEO of social media pioneer Plaxo, which was acquired by Comcast in 2008. Golub also spent eight years at VeriSign, Inc., serving as Chief Marketing Officer, as Senior Vice President of the security and payments business, and as General Manager of VeriSign's managed security services business.
Ben tweets at @golubbe.

[…] to celebrate his first investment as a venture capitalist. Docker, formerly known as dotCloud, announced today $15 million in Series B cash to build a business around its cloud open source technology, for […]

[…] makes casual slacks open-source software to help apps run on multiple platforms – raised a $15 million Series B from Greylock Partners, Benchmark and Jerry Yang. Jerry Chen, previously the head of cloud and […]